There's a worrying tendency today to equate wilful acts of murder (i.e. terrorism) with deaths due to (culpable) negligence or remission. I've heard people comparing jihadi terrorism to 1) boat refugees drowning in the Mediterranean 2) civilian casualties due to Western airstrikes in Syria, or even 3) the deaths of Grenfell fire.
In a discussion on Twitter on the relative percentage of terrorist attacks carried out my Muslim extremists, Youssef Kobo rhetorically asked me to "name a single year where causalities by religious terrorist acts in EU/US outnumbered civilian casualties in the Middle East and North Africa caused by Western bombardments".* A journalist of the Flemish newspaper De Standaard recently argued that the Grenfell drama is in fact the "deadliest attack of 2017", which, just like jihadi terrorism, was caused by a "radical ideology", namely Thatcherian neo-liberalism and its relentless privatisation.
This is serious case of moral m…

Is it time to get rid of fallacy theory?
Is there any use in having a laundry lists of labels for alleged reasoning errors, often with impressive
Latin names, that are constantly thrown around? Several people have pointed to the
“straw man fallacy” and the fallacy of “begging the question” (also known as circular reasoning or petitio principii) as counterexamples to
our Fallacy Fork, a destructive dilemma for fallacy fetishists which we developed in this paper (see also my earlier blog
post). In other words, they argue that these fallacies are (1) clear-cut and
easy to define (2) regularly occur in real life, not just in logic textbooks. If this is true, then these fallacies escape the Fallacy Fork. As we didn’t discuss circular reasoning in our paper, and the straw man fallacy
only very briefly, I’d like to address them here. Reasonable examples of circular reasoning certainly
exist. They are often characterized as instantiating "virtuous
circularity", as opposed to "v…

Last month, the philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James M. Lindsay perpetrated a hoax on the journal Cogent Social Science, in an attempt to expose the academic field of Gender Studies. The paper, entitled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct", is a hilarious piece of satire, making the preposterous argument that the human penis is not so much an anatomical organ, but "a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct" that is damaging to society because it is "exclusionary to disenfranchised communities". After revealing the hoax in Skeptic Magazine, the perpetrators have received lots of encomiums for their efforts, but they have also taken quite some flak. By itself, this is not unusual, as it also happened to Alan Sokal when he pulled off his famous hoax on cultural studies in 1996. But this time, the criticism also came from within the skeptical community. Now Boghossian and Lindsay have published a point-by-point rebuttal of their…

Summary: Fallacy theory is popular among skeptics, but it is in serious trouble. Every fallacy in the traditional taxonomy runs into a destructive dilemma which I call the Fallacy Fork: either it hardly ever occurs in real life, or it is not actually fallacious. ----------------
Why do people believe weird things? Why
is there so much irrationality in the world? Here’s a standard answer from the
sceptic’s playbook: fallacies. Fallacies are certain types of arguments that
are common, attractive, persistent, and dead wrong. Because people keep
committing fallacies, so the story goes, they end up believing all sorts of
weird things. In popular books about skepticism
and in the pages of skeptical magazines such as this one, one commonly finds a
concise treatment of the most common types of fallacies. The traditional
classification is widely known, often by its Latin name: ad hominem, ad ignorantiam, ad populum, begging the question, post hoc
ergo propter hoc. Some of them are more obscure, …